Dream Analysis and Culture

Dream Analysis and Culture CORY: OK. Perfect. I'm Cory. And on behalf of Global Connections, I'd like to welcome you tonight to our webinar on dream analysis. Please feel free to use the chat box for any questions or comments throughout the presentation. And you have any trouble hearing or seeing any aspects of tonight, please send me a message and let me know, because that's what I'm here for. And I'm very pleased to present Emily Castillas. She's going to be our presenter this evening. And she's a doctoral student and instructor in the Department of Anthropology, specializing in psychological anthropology. Her research interests include parenting, cross cultural conceptions of the self, decision making, cultural change, and Latin America. EMILY CASTILLAS: Hello. OK welcome. Thank you for coming to Dream Analysis and Culture. And my name, as she said, is Emily Castillas. I want to repeat what she said about typing in questions. I can see the text box there, and I'm happy to answer. If I go too fast, or confusing in any way, let me now. So we are going to talk about dreams. If I can get the first slide here. All right. What are dreams? So dreams are very interesting to lots and lots of people, not just here, but all around the world. So what we'll talk about a little bit here is why is that? Why are we so interested in them? And what can they tell us? What can we learn about ourselves? What can we learn about other things? About our culture or about our society. And it has a lot more possibilities than we think. But one point we will make, too, is that different cultures have different ideas of what you can learn from a dream. So one thing that is interesting is that the existence of dreams or the phenomenon of dreaming, is universal among human groups-- among humans all over the world. And that's really, really unusual. They're not a lot of things that are human universal. So even things that we take for granted, we think are so normal, things that happen in our relationships, the way we think about things in the world, these turn out to not be universal. There's a lot of cross cultural variation in a lot of really basic things. But the existence of dreams is cross cultural. So that must mean they're tied, somehow, to our biology. They're somehow fundamental to our species. They're not just a cultural phenomenon that happens in some places, but not others. Dreams occur in almost all mammals, from what we can tell. And more and more scientific research is coming out all the time that allows us to understand that other animals are dreaming. Not all mammals dream. But almost all of them do. So that's another clue that it's gotta be something a little bit deeper, something in our biology, something we inherited from our ancestors, shared ancestors with some other mammals. So that's interesting. Another fact about dreams that some of you probably already know, is that they're associated with a phase in the sleep cycle called Rapid Eye Movement or REM sleep. So they don't happen all the time when we're sleeping. And we certainly don't remember all of our dreams, as you all have experienced in your own lives, I'm sure. Some people claim to never dream or to almost never dream, but the evidence from EKGs and things like that, shows us that these people probably are dreaming, They're just not remembering their dreams. That's a separate issue. So, interesting thing. People have talked about dreams, theorized about dreams, come up with ideas about dreams, as far back as we have written record. So it's been interesting to us as a species for a really, really long time. Not so ancient, but pretty ancient, is the Greek. They had a god called Asklepios who was a healing god. And you can see on the slideshow, you can see a picture of him-- well, a statue of him. And you can see a snake crawling up a staff. And that might look familiar to you as part of the symbol of The American Medical Association. He was a healing god. And what the belief was was that he could help heal people through dream. So if you were ill, you would go to one of his temples, where his priests and priestesses were working. And they would perform certain rituals, and then you would sleep in the temple. And while you were sleeping, the god might come to you in your dream and heal you during your dream cycle. So that was an early belief in Western culture. It's very interesting. Different cultures around the world have completely different ideas about what dreams are, what they do for us, what you should do about them, and there's just a huge variety. I can't even begin to touch on them. But I will give you just a little sample. The Toraja people of Indonesia have a very interesting cluster of beliefs about dreams. They believe that dreams are prophetic, that they can tell you things about the future, things that are going to happen in your life. They also think that when you're dreaming, you could be attacked by spirits. So it's a little bit of a time of vulnerability as well. Not that you would always be attacked. Just sometimes. And a lot of other cultures believe something similar, that spirits, that creatures of the spirit world, that otherworldly beings, can visit dreamers. And that includes the practitioners of Haitian vodou. And they believe that you can have contact with important spirits in dreams. They can help you, give you advice, warn you of things. So there's a lot of importance around dreaming and what those dreams can mean in your life. The Shan people of northern Thailand also believe that dreams can warn you that bad things are going to happen. They believe that if you dream of your teeth falling out, that means that misfortune is coming. So there's a really wide variety, really interesting. And then, on the other end of that spectrum, a lot of cultures believe that you shouldn't talk about your dreams. That they're very, very private. That they would reveal something too private about you if you shared your dreams with other people. Or that some kind of punishment would come, spiritual punishment would come, if you shared your dream. So some cultures love to talk about dreams, think that it's very important to share your dreams with other people. Other cultures think they should be secret. So big variety. So let's move on to around here, to Western culture. History of dream analysis here. And analyzing dreams goes back to the very beginning of what we call psychology, or the study of psychology. And Sigmund Freud, Dr. Sigmund Freud, is probably the most famous person associated with dream analysis in Western culture. And he was an early theorist associating it with psychology. And he was associated with the technique called free association. And he believed that you had to sit and think about your dream, and that the items or the content in your dream were not necessarily the most important thing. But instead, those were symbols of more important things. So if you dreamt about one thing, it was actually symbolizing something else. And we'll talk about that more later on. He also wrote a book called The Interpretation of Dreams, we know that it was important to him. So manifest content is the actual things you see in your dream, the items, the person you were talking to, or the animal that was in your dream, or the place that you were at, that the manifest content. It's the things you can put a name on and see. Things that were happening in the dream. And then the latent content is that underneath, that symbolic, that hidden meaning. And he believed that that was the more important part of your dream. So that was his thing. And then he went on to teach lots of other people about his theories. An early theorist in anthropology about dreams was Dorothy Eggan. She was very important and interesting because she believed that dreams could tell us something about a person's culture. So I'm an anthropology student. I'm an anthropologist. So to me, this is the interesting question, right. It's really interesting to find out what a dream means to an individual person. But to me, the even more interesting thing is what does that tell us about that dreamer's culture? What does that tell us about a larger group of people? And that's something I don't think a lot of people think about dreams being able to do for us. But they really can. So it's interesting to me. So she said that you couldn't just do a one to one kind of analysis. Some early dream theorists, and some people still today, believed that certain symbols meant certain things exactly. So if you dreamt of well, say, your teeth falling out, that meant bad things were going to happen. The symbol means an exact thing. One to one. She said it doesn't really work like that.

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